


Holding Pattern

by ArtemisTheHuntress



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Gen, Ocelot is being annoying as always, implications of past underage relationships, implications of the Patriots just being an absolutely shitty institution to grow up in, spies not trusting each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-01 18:34:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19183408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArtemisTheHuntress/pseuds/ArtemisTheHuntress
Summary: 2007.  A Patriots charm agent gets a new assignment.





	Holding Pattern

**Author's Note:**

> For [Women of Metal Gear Week 2019!](https://twitter.com/WomenOfMGS) Day 3 - what's in a name?

Her desk buzzer rang. "Hey, Marguerite?” Joey the intern said over the intercom. “There’s a guy here to see you.”

She eyed the blinking light on the little speaker with a tinge of annoyance, but pressed the button to answer. “Who is it? Mr. Johnson isn’t supposed to be in until three.”

“It’s not Mr. Johnson. This guy’s name is Leon Katz. He says he’s a colleague of yours and—” A pause, muffled sounds of a man speaking— “He says you were expecting him to drop in at some point soon?”

Damn it. She sighed, and piled together the papers she had been working on. She didn’t know anyone named Leon Katz, had never worked with anyone even temporarily going by Leon Katz, and had been planning on getting some of her backed-up paperwork done this morning. Which meant that the Patriots had decided she needed a little checkup. A little reminder that they were still monitoring her.

It made sense. She hadn’t heard from them for a few months now, not since the all-points alert about another Metal Gear project destroyed, one that wasn’t supposed to have been. It was good to know, but not part of her responsibility. Solid Snake and his shenanigans had never been a subject assigned to her to track or look out for, so she’d had the time to set up a nice independent consulting practice for herself. She even had an office and everything. It was a space that was _hers_ , a world apart from her duties as an agent of the owners of the free world.

They clearly didn’t like that very much.

“Oh, of course,” she said. “Send him in.”

Footsteps on the carpeted hallway approached her door. She slipped her hand under her desk, her fingers ready to pull out the derringer from its cut-out shelf. Leon Katz. Who would he be, and— oh, of fucking _course_.

“Marguerite!” Revolver Ocelot said, as he swung the door open. “It’s been too long!”

“Leon!” she said, summoning up a friendly smile and bringing her hands back up to the top of the desk. Faking ease was the easiest thing to learn. “I was wondering when you’d drop in.”

He shut the door, then stepped forward and swung his leg over the arm of the small office’s guest chair, sitting sideways, his long brown coat spilling over the sides and the floor. “I always enjoy a chance to reconnect with an old friend. May we talk privately?”

She knew exactly what he meant. “The office is soundproofed and there are no bugs.” None but her own, anyway, but if Revolver Ocelot was in the habit of assuming that people were telling him the truth he probably wouldn’t have lived to be as old as he was. He didn’t challenge her.

“Good,” he said, dropping the cheeriness but not his stupid sideways-reclining on her poor chair. “There’s a new assignment for you.”

“Must be an important one, if they sent you to deliver the message yourself.”

He spread his arms innocently. “I was just in the neighborhood.”

Unlikely, but she let it slide. It seemed basic politeness among spies; what was the point of calling out all the stupid little lies? (She was more concerned with noticing that he had two hands again. When did that happen?)

“I don’t suppose they want me for a nice interesting psych analysis,” she said.

“Oh, that’ll be part of it.” Ocelot reached into his coat (with his left hand; interesting) and pulled out a plain manila file folder. “The La-li-lu-le-lo have big plans for this one.”

She took it, and groaned upon seeing a photo of a man immediately upon opening. “It’s a honeypot mission, isn’t it?”

Ocelot did not sound apologetic at all. “That _is_ what you excel at.”

It was true, but that didn’t stop it from being annoying. She was 26; she’d been doing this for ten years, and she was getting tired, and she’d kind of hoped that as she got older she could stop doing the seduction part so much and focus more on her work as a data analyst. Her last honeypot assignment was almost a year ago. Maybe this was another part of the Patriots’ _subtle_ reminder that she still belonged to them.

She skimmed through the papers in the file. It wasn’t quite as bad as it could be; the target was 23, for one thing, which was a refreshing change of pace. She herself been playing ages 18-23 since she was sixteen, and so many of her targets were men in their 40s or 50s. Younger than her was rare. 23 was shockingly young; her last guy had been a 32-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur who’d stumbled upon an interesting piece of software that the Patriots decided they wanted, and wanted to keep away from anyone else. And _that_ guy had been one of her youngest targets to date. What was a 23-year-old doing to interest that Patriots?

“What do they want with this guy? What’s the goal?” His psych profile was a hell and half. Child soldier in Africa, in the Liberian Civil War, brain possibly permanently altered by being force-fed psychoactive substances, memories probably repressed but it was unclear. Evasive and belligerent on his most recent psych eval. Plenty of notes about his life from ages 6-11, very few about his life now. A soldier in the US army. Few friends. Lots of VR training, little combat experience as an adult. Not much good info.

“The La-li-lu-le-lo have not deigned to inform me what their plans are,” Ocelot said, and who knew if that was the truth or not, or even if it was true, if it really meant he didn't know. “But they’re interested in this man Jack, and they want only their finest woman on the job.” He stretched. “You have a psychology background, don’t you?”

She did. Psych and computer science double major in college. It had taken her six damn years to get her undergraduate degree because the Patriots kept interrupting her semesters to send her out on missions. They offered to educate her through their own channels, of course, but teaching college-level computing, math, or psychology was a bit different from the primary- and secondary-school education (with necessary spycraft and charm supplements, of course) that they’d given her.

“Is that what they need?” she asked, flipping through the scant pages of his profile from age 18 onward. “An observer to supplement their file? Someone on the inside to get to know him, learn his secrets, go into his room and rifle through his personal things?”

“Well. And an operative to be in place whenever the La-li-lu-le-lo make their move.”

She pressed her lips together. This is what she had been afraid of. “So it’s a holding-pattern assignment.”

“I was informed so, yes.”

A holding pattern. Reinvent yourself for the target, get close, get romantic, get to be part of his life… and then stay like that, for an indefinite amount of time, until further instructions came in.

She looked down at the photo of the man in the file. He was young, and his white-blond hair somehow made him look even younger. He was scowling a bit, which really made him look more confused than threatening. She wondered what would happen if she rejected the offer. If she just kept being Marguerite, data analytics consultant for businesses and governments, volunteering at the community TV studio on Wednesday nights, watching cheesy horror movies alone in her apartment with the lights off. She’d even gladly keep doing data analysis for the Patriots, too, it wasn’t as if she didn’t want to do her _job_ , and the Patriots certainly brought her much more interesting problems to solve with much more meaningful impacts, but she’d finally found a kind of stability she liked.

It wouldn’t happen, of course, and she knew it. She sighed and turned to the pages of recommendations for her new persona for the next who-knew-how-long. She wondered why she wasn’t asked to assist in observing him and prepping this file herself. She wondered what they were hiding this time.

The recommendations were to be expected. She had to relocate, of course. But — New York City; it’d be interesting, at least. She scanned the list, falling easily into long-practiced habits, trying to match it to what the profile said, work out a profile of her own, for herself, to be the best fit. Suggestions for a new hair color, new eye color, new interests. The notes said he was proud, seemed to have a lot to prove, and had unpredictable emotional control; she’d start with the doe-eyed, easily awed ingénue, then, until she got a better personal read on him. With military types or wannabe macho-men that was usually a good base. He was suspicious, too, not very trusting, and easily confused; so engineering a meet-cute might be difficult. Approaching him might get his hackles up. Allowing him a confrontation to win, maybe? But she couldn’t start the confrontation herself, of course… 

She realized she was already taking the assignment as a given.

Well, she didn’t have a whole lot of choice, did she? Might as well start getting into character now.

“Rosemary, then?” she said, at the neatly-typed new identity assigned to her at the top of the page.

“It took a committee all day to settle on the perfect name for that suggested new profile. They want this to be flawless,” Ocelot said, not even bothering to pretend he hadn’t read the file too. How involved _was_ he in the upper echelons of power? She didn’t even know.

 _Rosemary_. She had to give them credit, it was a good name. Feminine and a bit traditional — it sounded like Jack would like that — but young-sounding, too. Immediately recognizable as a name, easy to pronounce and remember and spell, but not too generic. Easy to turn into a cute nickname. They even got _rose_ in there, prime him to be thinking about falling in love — but _rosemary_ itself evoked something a little more practical, like earth or a kitchen, and for someone in the army who liked stability and routine, maybe that would be comforting, too. He watched a lot of movies alone in his room himself, his file also noted, so hell, they could even do the “Jack and Rose” thing, it was so gag-inducingly _cute_ , the perfect name for the perfect fake girlfriend.

“It’s too bad,” was what she decided to say instead. “I’ve come to like being Marguerite.”

“Tell him ‘Rosemary’ is your middle name, then,” Ocelot drawled, caring not one bit about what she preferred. “You’ll still be an analyst, and the less backstory the La-li-lu-le-lo have to manufacture themselves, the better for all of us.”

 _Marguerite_ wouldn’t cut it as this man’s fake girlfriend’s name, but maybe “Rosemary was what my friends called me in college, I like it better, it’s more fun…” If said with a giggle and a lowered voice, like a secret privy only to him, that might work fantastically, they often loved “a cute nickname only you call me” or “you’re the only one who gets to use my _real_ name…”

Marguerite — no, Rosemary — shut the file and placed it in her drawer. Really, what was a person but a collection of data, of thoughts and opinions and memories and skills and habits — and what was a data set but patterns to be found and problems to be solved? It was all the same job, really. A different application of the same set of skills. This is what she was trained for, after all. This is what they expected her to do. And she could find a way to find something interesting in it while she waited for orders. “Thank you for your visit, Mr. Katz. It’s been just an _absolute_ delight to talk to you, as ever. You can go now.”

**Author's Note:**

> You know that feeling when you just, want to give female Metal Gear characters thoughts and feelings and internal lives out of spite


End file.
